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MySpace is announcing a broad ranging embrace of data portability standards today, along with data sharing partnerships with Yahoo, Ebay, Twitter and their own Photobucket subsidiary. The new project is being called MySpace “Data Availability” and is an example, MySpace says, of their dedication to playing nice with the rest of the Internet.

A mockup of how the data sharing will look in action with Twitter is shown above. MySpace is essentially making key user data, including (1) Publicly available basic profile information, (2) MySpace photos, (3) MySpaceTV videos, and (4) friend networks, available to partners via their (previousy internal) RESTful API, along with user authentication via OAuth.

Via TechCrunch

Via MarketWire

PALO ALTO, CA–(Marketwire - April 21, 2008) - Gigya, the largest performance-based widget distribution network and provider of tools and technologies for distributing, tracking and analyzing widgets, and MySpacePros.com, the leading community site for MySpace developers, today announced a partnership to provide new business tools, information and support to the MySpace developer community.

“We can’t think of a more natural partnership than this one between MySpacePros, the most comprehensive and trusted site for MySpace Developers, and Gigya, the developer’s tool of choice for enabling widget distribution and tracking,” said Eyal Magen, CEO. “Providing new tools that help MySpace developers to grow their businesses helps both of our companies increase the value we provide to this important user group.”

Read the full press release

Christine “Forbidden” Dolce, Tila Tequila and Bobbi Billard each have accumulated more than a million admirers on MySpace.com, making them among the handful of most popular people on the world’s most popular social networking website.

That may have something to do with the amount of skin they show on their MySpace pages. More obscured than their bawdy photo galleries, however, are their attempts to cash in on their online fame by using MySpace as a storefront to sell perfume, poker and soft-core porn.

The cyber pin-ups can’t come right out and peddle their wares because MySpace officially bans most commerce. But any suitor would have little trouble finding online pathways to the three hotties by following “hints” they drop on their MySpace pages.

And these detours are the subject of intense debate at MySpace, Rupert Murdoch’s prized Internet property.

MySpace bans commerce between its members because it doesn’t want to jeopardize the corporate advertising that accounts for the vast majority of its profit. Allowing its members to promote their wares would only clutter up the place.

“We don’t want users’ pages to start looking like NASCAR,” MySpace Chief Executive Chris DeWolfe said.

Read the full story at the L.A. Times

This one is from Mashable and is just another example of Myspace jumping before looking. I honestly don’t think they have a development branch of Myspace.com and am beginning to think they beta test with the production site.

This is just bizarre: MySpace has started to filter out the letter “i” on MySpace blogs - all of them. No matter where the letter “i” appears in a word or sentence, it gets replaced with “..”. The only place where an “i” can be used is in the title of a post.

MySpace users, of course, have been trying to complain about it on their blogs, with the obvious limitation that they can’t actually mention the blocked letter in their complaints. You can see some fun examples here, here, here, here and here (contains swearing, if you’re sensitive about that kinda thing).

We can only assume that MySpace is really, really fed up of all the iPhone coverage. Sorry, we mean the ..phone.

Go to Mashable for more

While not completely related to myspace marketing alone, AdSense is very much related to what we do and Google has quitely added a new feature to AdSense. You can read all AdSense’s rounded corners at my (unfinished) blog.

Check this out. You want to listen to your favorite bands music on the go, but downloading their mp3’s is a pain. Enter this site I came across called http://myspacemp3.org. You enter the bands name and it generates a list of all their music. Click the thumbtack image to download.

I really like when people take the time to develop technology that just “works” . Good job guys.

Hosting people’s lives online has become big business: services like Flickr and Photobucket serve as a virtual shoe box for millions of photographs, while YouTube and MySpace Video regularly serve up a daily dose of video blogs, home videos, and crazy stunts. But what happens when some of those services depend on the others in order to grow, and the others don’t like being used to help the competition?

That’s a thorny issue that MySpace has found itself in the middle of, and they’re not backing down. The latest: the Powers That Be™ behind MySpace made another move to block content hosted by competitors from being embedded on user profile pages within the site—this time, the popular photo and video hosting site Photobucket. 

Click here to read the full story at Ars Technica

This was posted by Chili in the forums just now and I think it definitely deserves a mention:

Just got an email from Google:

“Thank you for advertising with Google AdWords. After reviewing your
account, we’ve found that one or more of your ads or keywords does not
meet our guidelines. You can see your disapproved ad(s), the reason for
disapproval, and editorial suggestions, from the Disapproved Ads page
within your account.

Ad Status: Suspended - Pending Revision
Ad Issue(s): Trademark in Ad Content
~~~~~~~~~

SUGGESTIONS:
-> Ad Content: Please remove the following trademark from your
ad: “MySpace”.
”

Sure enough you cannot use “myspace” in your ads anymore:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=myspace+layouts

Anyone else get this message?

After Jeremy (a.k.a Shoemoney) posted about MySpacePros on his blog I wanted to return the favor by talking about his latest venture, AuctionAds.

While not directly related to MySpace Marketing, it is an excellent program I think is going to be very successful for the people who participate and worth a mention here on MySpacePros.To really get an idea of what AuctionAds is all about you’ll want to head over to the AuctionAds FAQ, but the short of it is that they have made it incredibly simple to place contextually relevant Ebay Listings on your site. The real kicker is that the ads are not contextually based so you can run them on your site along side AdSense, YPN or any other contextual ad network you may be running.

I’ll post in the future about our en devours with integrating his system on one of our sites and how it turns out, so stay tuned. In the meantime I recommend you check it out.

*there are no affiliate links in this post*